Monday, March 27, 2023 – Arrival and Site Scouting

Today I arrived in Nome and met the team I would be working with this week which consisted of people from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and UROC (University of Maryland UAS Research and Operations Center). The group members from NOAA were Sean Helfrich, Larry Conner, and Yinghui Liu, and Jeff Key. The UROC team was split into two teams, operational (Grant Williams and Josh Gaus) and sensor (Boryana Efremova and Frank Padula) teams. After dropping our equipment at the hotel, we drove east on the Nome-Council Road to the area were the UROC team had applied for flight clearance. We were looking for an area with more than 1.5 km of fast ice width and a variety of flat and rubble ice. We found an area east of the Nome River using the Nome Sea Ice Radar and a quick walk out on the ice to confirm the area met our requirements. Grant then made the flight plan and gave the ice team, NOAA personnel and I, the coordinates.

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